Legal concerns over disturbing AI images...

Good morning, and welcome to a new week of fresh and crispy AI news, straight out of the boiling fryer! 🍟

🔨 AI TOOLS OF THE DAY

🗣️ Astrocyte: Create and chat with AI characters. → check it out

📩 Whisper Memos: Record a voice memo and receive an email with the transcription. → check it out

💯 EssayGrader: A piece of software that reduces the time it takes teachers to grade essays/papers using AI. → check it out

HOLLYWOOD AI STRIKE GETTING CLOSER TO AN END 🙏

Hollywood and the AI bots might be getting closer to an agreement. 🤝

What’s happening? After a grueling 145 days of strikes, Hollywood writers and producers appear to be making significant headway in negotiations. However, one major obstacle looms large: the role of AI in content creation. The latest round of negotiations surrounding AI, which lasted eight hours, ended without a deal.

Want some details? The negotiations involve two key parties: the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), representing major studios and streaming services. The strike has wreaked havoc on the industry, leading to the premature conclusion of television programs and delays in fall season debuts. Central to the writers' demands are fair compensation for streaming revenue, increased royalties, and protection against potential job losses due to AI-driven content creation.

What does this mean? It is difficult to imagine the governing bodies will decide to throw out useful and cost-effective AI tools entirely, so it remains unclear what sort of deal will make the writers happy. Striking a balance between effective AI use and the rights of humans and utilization of human creativity will be the focus as negotiations continue this week.

WINDOWS 11 IS GETTING NEW AI FEATURES 🦾

Q: Why are PCs like air conditioners?

A: They stop working properly if you open Windows. 😆

What’s up? Microsoft is set to release the AI-powered Copilot for Windows 11, which will debut on September 26th, and they have also revealed plans to implement OpenAI’s new DALL-E 3 model into their Bing search engine.

What will these features look like? Microsoft 365 Copilot seamlessly merges AI language models with Windows interfaces. Users can access Copilot as an app or by right-clicking, making it incredibly intuitive to use. Copilot integrates with familiar Microsoft applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and is available for a monthly subscription fee of $30 per user (on top of the existing Microsoft 365 subscription). This AI-powered feature can serve as an assistant to streamline repetitive tasks such as document creation and presentation design. It can also enhance popular applications like Paint, Photos, and Clipchamp, providing users with a more intelligent and efficient experience. Microsoft also plans to harness the power of OpenAI's new DALL-E 3 model to deliver more advanced search results on their search engine, Bing.

DISTURBING AI-GENERATED IMAGES PROMPT LEGAL CONCERNS 😐

Ethical use of AI continues to be a concern, and now the concern might just be more weighty than ever. 🙏

What’s up? More than twenty girls in Almendralejo, Spain returned to school after summer break to find AI-generated naked images of themselves on their mobile phones. The teenagers, originally fully clothed in the real photos, were shocked by the lifelike nature of these images.

How did this happen? These hyper-realistic deepfake images, created using the ClothOff app, had been stolen from their Instagram accounts, digitally altered, and then circulated in WhatsApp groups.

What can be done? The Almendralejo case serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need for updated legislation to address this evolving form of digital exploitation. Existing laws may not adequately address deepfake-related offenses, as the privacy of the person in question is not technically violated since the content is artificially generated. However, the European Commission proposed criminalizing such offenses in a directive on cybercrime in 2022, and some legal experts argue that these deepfake incidents could be considered crimes against moral integrity or distribution of non-consensual sexual content, carrying penalties of imprisonment.

MEME MONDAY 🤣

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